I’ve never liked comic books. In fact, I mostly despise the entire medium. Super hero comics, the industry’s bread and butter, are little more than juvenile fantasy fulfillment featuring characters with backstories tangled up in decades worth of convoluted continuity. Feel free to quote this right back at me after my next epic Transformers update. Individual issues are too short and too expensive, taking months, if not years, to resolve their cross-promoted, soap opera-esque story arcs that leave no lasting effect on characters or their world. Good is good; evil is evil; and despite publishers’ hype, nothing ever changes. In short, comic books are dull.

At one point in 2002, I think, Toastyfrog.com was decked out in a Watchmen theme, even if Archive.org has no record of it, the site’s title character asking, “Who toasts the toastyfrog?” Only vaguely aware of Wikipedia, I turned to Jeremy Parish to find out just what Watchmen was. After all, he had just revealed himself to be more of an expert on the subject than anyone else I knew. Amazon had informed me Watchmen was a 12-issue super hero comic book series that had been collected as a single novel. I had heard about the book before, briefly mentioned in blogs and forums, but always assumed it was just another super hero comic series among many, no different from X-Men or Spider-Man. Its title certainly did little to dissuade this perception. Parish quickly put my fears to rest in an e-mail, assuring me that Watchmen was entirely self-contained with a beginning, middle, and end – not part of a larger comic book continuity – and though it involved super heroes, was tightly scripted and generally excellent. Around this time of year while home from college for winter break, I bought the book to help kill time during the holidays. What I found beneath its bright yellow cover completely changed my reading habits and perception of the medium. I just finished my fifth yearly reading of Watchmen and still managed to uncover plenty of new discoveries hidden between its pages.

One of the book’s greatest strengths is that it can only exist as a comic book (which makes the fact that it’s finally being filmed after so many failed attempts by Zack “300” Snyder all the more troubling). Its pages are littered with a tremendous number of tiny details that foreshadow future developments or outright reveal major plot points long before they enter the narrative proper. Newspaper headlines, graffiti on distant walls, and seemingly insignificant characters shuffling through the background all enrich and flesh out the world, providing hints of what’s to come and filling in what’s already happened. Because you can spend as much time as you want studying a single frame or rip through the pages reading dialogue bubbles and avoiding all else, Watchmen effectively rewards you in direct proportion to the energy you invest in it. It’s a surprisingly interactive experience and a book that takes full advantage of its medium.

It also manages to translate many cinematic techniques, including montage and slow motion, to its paneled pages of still images. The panels are treated like shots from a camera, and only things a camera could record – images, sound – show up on the page. There are no thought bubbles or internal monologues. The book is actually a multimedia experience, despite being limited to images on a page. Besides its blatantly filmic techniques, Watchmen also features excerpts from a character’s autobiography, police reports, internal company memos, and Tales of the Black Freighter, a lengthy comic-within-a-comic that recounts a pirate tale with themes and events that echo those of Watchmen itself. Pirate comic books are very popular in the world of Watchmen.

After all, there’s no need for super hero comics in Watchmen’s alternate version of 1985 where super heroes are real. Or rather, a super hero is real. The only vaguely human collection of energy now called Dr. Manhattan is all that remains of a research scientist accidentally bombarded by an unhealthy dose of radiation in the New Mexico desert. Dr. Manhattan has become the US government’s own personal demi-god, leading to radical advances in technology – electric cars and airships, for starters – and acting as a nuclear deterrent against the Russians. In fact, the good doctor single handily won the Vietnam War for the United States. America loved then-president Nixon so much, that even in 1985 he remains the nation’s commander-in-chief, the 20th amendment repealed.

Other super heroes exist, although there’s little super about them. They existed a full generation before Dr. Manhattan’s accidental creation, in fact. This first order of heroes has long since stepped aside – the lucky ones retired, the not-so-lucky ones are dead or insane – so that a second generation could follow in their footsteps until their vigilantism was made illegal following a 1977 police strike. Nite Owl, a sort of Batman equivalent – wealthy and with a secret basement full of gadgets – has found himself impotent, quite literally, in fact, since giving up costumed adventuring. His former partner, Rorschach, is a hard-boiled detective with a penchant for violence, the inkblots on his mask shifting into a new position in every panel. He continues fighting for justice for a world that no longer wants him, hunted by the police for the two murders they can pin on him. He would be a villain in any other comic. When The Comedian – think Captain America crossed with The Punisher and The Joker – is thrown from his highrise apartment window to the street below, old friends and enemies that haven’t spoken in eight years suddenly find themselves back in each other’s lives as they search for answers and try to solve the murder of their fellow hero, even if he was never quite their friend. Someone’s killing masks, and Dr. Manhattan has fled the planet, leaving the Russians free to invade Afghanistan and heat up the Cold War.

While it deals with global conflicts, Watchmen’s plot primarily uses the escalating Cold War as a backdrop to the ever-deepening mystery behind The Comedian’s murder. This is a complicated book that hops between characters and subplots as often as it leaps through time. Alan Moore wanted to write the Moby Dick of comic books and with Watchmen he succeeds, both in its sheer complexity and in its literary value. The book seriously considers the kind of person that puts on a mask to fight crime in the dead of night and concludes that this is probably the last sort of person in the world you would want protecting you. It takes a psychopath to jump between rooftops at 3:00 AM dressed as an owl, and a special sort of sickness to think it’s doing any good. In fact, Watchmen challenges many of the assumptions of the super hero comic book, which is partly why I’m so captivated by it. It takes a cold, hard look at extraordinary men in spandex as protectors of society and suggests that perhaps society should be thinking of protecting itself from them. Without getting into the finer details of the plot or spoiling any of its most affecting scenes, Watchmen challenges your moral beliefs and your very definition of a hero.

Like Moore’s earlier work (V for Vendetta, Miracleman), Watchmen is a book about personal beliefs taken to their extreme. It doesn’t necessarily provide us with any heroes or any villains either. This is a complex work that deserves a place on any respectable bookshelf, even on one owned by someone with complete contempt for its medium and genre. This book made me appreciate the potential of comic books, which should be called comic books and not “graphic novels” or “sequential art” or any other made-up name to justify the fact that adults read them too. Like video games, comics books are a medium that was first designed as simple pulp entertainment mostly targeted at children, but has since evolved into something more.

I’m glad I sent that e-mail five years ago about a few jpegs on a version of a website that Archive.org assures me never existed. After Watchmen, I read nearly all of Alan Moore’s other books and moved on to discover Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and Art Speilelman, among others. As an introduction to the medium, it’s hard to ask for a better candidate than a book that breaks all the rules, points out how ridiculous they were in the first place, and continues fullsteam ahead to tell a story that stands on equal footing with the best from any other art form. Having finished my fifth reading of the book several hours ago, smiling with each new discovery and revelation, I look forward to next year’s reading and the new insight it will bring. Everyone should read Watchmen now, before Snyder’s movie, regardless of its final quality, colors their perceptions of the book. Even if you’ve already read it once, twice, or a dozen times, dust off your copy and read it. This is a work that single-handedly endeared me to its very medium and each year it seems just as fresh, exciting, and poignant as the last.